Dog Games

R has had a roller coaster of adjustments over the past 8 weeks since K died. For a while, R was an only dog and seemed to enjoy being the center of attention. But, he also seems to have enjoyed recently becoming a big brother. He still is his usual fun-loving self who you all know for the "cracker dog" that he is.

During the time between when K died and Shyla arrived, I had a lot of fun teaching R some "tricks". The first one was to lie on his side with his head resting on the ground and to stay in that position until I released him. He learned the this "relax" trick in the house but, soon thereafter, we started practicing other places. He lay in a bed of flowers and grass in the meadow.

And, he lay atop Hug Hill.

The "relax" trick is actually great in the vet's office. I've trained him to lie on either his left or right side so that the vet can work on whichever side she needs to.

We learned other fun tricks like "take a bow". And, we worked on serious things like off-leash heeling. We had so much fun together. I adore training dogs, and R adores being trained. A perfect match!

Tomorrow, our boy gets his echocardiogram to check for a heart tumor. We both believe, based on intuition, that it will be clean. The only niggling worry in my mind is that I have is that I haven't seen his eyes shine like in the photo below in a while. This photo was from about a month ago.

Many other things about R seem great. He adores playing with his sister. He still seeks me out for games of training (I try to never make training "serious" - rather I make it a "game"). So, I'm hoping that the eye shine will return as his blood cells rejuvenate from whatever damaged them.

Today, I also did some socialization work with our amazing trainer and Shyla. We went to the outskirts of town to an area with a fair bit of foot traffic but many people have dogs with them. Because Shyla loves dogs, their presence helps her to be outgoing with the people who are walking the dogs. It worked beautifully, as Shyla approached a few strangers all on her own initiative. I'll talk more about how we'll be teaching Shyla about the big world full of new things in coming posts. But, I now have no doubt that she'll adjust to everyday life with a slow and steady approach.

It's fun to train two such happy and enthusiastic dogs. The one thing that is important to me, that I haven't kept up with due to time constraints, is to keep spending one-on-one time with R, training and playing, so that he still knows how special he is despite all of the attention that his sister is getting!